There is a shortage of decency in the high-tech industry.
I base both these assertions on my experiences at the symposium today, where I met not one but two other individuals in basically the same situation as I am. As long as the high-tech industry considers the following non-qualifications to be job requirements:,
Male,
Between the ages of twenty-five and fifty,
Thinks coding is the most fun thing in the universe,
Thinks coding is about the only truly fun thing in the universe, really, and
Outside of role-playing games, martial arts, and science fiction and fantasy fandom, thinks there’s basically little else of interest besides computers.
Then, yes, that industry will continue to suffer a “shortage” of “qualified” people.
Last night I fed “people who can’t settle” into my search engine of choice. I was surprised, but only for a brief moment, when most of the responses were geared to people (mostly men) who couldn’t settle down romatically. Of course. That does apply to most men, which is 90% or more of why I cannot and never will self-identify as a gay man; their subculture is so much geared around anonymous and casual sex, which I want basically no part of.
There were basically two responses that did not fall into the sexual category: one,two.
Interestingly, they both said basically the same thing; namely, that some of us simply have a stronger sense of purpose and ideals and higher personal standards, and this prevents us from being pleased or at least accepting of situations that most would find worth settling for. They also said that those of us who fall into that category should not water down our standards and settle. (It usually doesn’t turn out very well for us if we do.)
Well, OK. That’s basically what I had already concluded on my own. So there it is.
However, it raises an issue: About three years ago, I decided to embrace being more settled, because (a) I thought I could, and (b) being settled does have its advantages.
On that first point, it’s looking more and more like I was dead wrong: I managed by sheer luck to find a high-tech company where I could fit in… for a few years… until both the company and the job changed to the point where the magic (and totally unrepresentative) match no longer existed. Ever since then, it’s become increasingly obvious just how badly I fit into that world. I didn’t (and couldn’t) know that at the time, of course. I actually was aware of that possibility; it was one reason I decided to wait several years after landing that job before buying a home. I was waiting for that other shoe to drop. Alas, it dropped after I had guessed (incorrectly, it appears) I had waited long enough.
On the second, I still think it’s valid. Being settled does have its advantages. I’ve been able to better pursue hobbies and interests now that I have a proper workspace for them. And in general, it’s been good to be in the Salish Sea ecoregion, the place I’ve called home longer than anywhere else in my life. There’s real benefit to experiencing the passage of time in a place I’ve known for several decades. I never knew I was missing that sort of experience (which most get to have) until I moved back.
So now I have this house which it appears I will no longer be able to afford and which no longer is appropriate to my needs (the only reason I bought it is because I assumed I had viable economic opportunities in Seattle I wouldn’t have elsewhere in the general region). One insight I’ve had is to drop any reluctance and sell it sooner rather than later, even though I haven’t been here the “standard” five years. That standard, of course, is based on the standard rate of appreciation, and prices have been going up at a significantly greater pace than the standard recently. Therefore, the market lets me get away with leaving early; more than that, the market will reward me for leaving now.
Alas, it’s not so simple. (It never is.) In this case, there’s all the connections, such as the ones at Islandwood, that I’ve built in the past year or two. It would be a pity to burn all those bridges. Together with the other advantages of being in the same region for a long time, I guess that means that if I move, I shouldn’t move very far.
I found a free font called Old Standard TT which seems to be a very faithful reproduction of a late 1800s modern serif font, so couldn’t resist giving it a try. No, it’s not up to the quality of a commercial font (for openers, it’s missing the ff, ffi, and ffl ligatures), but I’m budget sensitive and the price is right. Plus this is just a web page; its not as if I’m setting printed type.
We’ll see if this lasts. Right now, the layout smacks too much of sticking an old-fashioned font into a design which otherwise was intended to harmonize with modernist sans-serif type. I’ve been poking at it trying to change things, so I suspect the answer as to whether the new layout will last is how easy it ends up being to bend CSS to my will and make it generate a more appealing layout.
And yes, this is modern serif you are seeing, despite it today being a style of years past. Much of the serif type one sees in production books (or on web sites) these days are actually far older designs that were revived (the popular Baskerville font dates from the mid-1700s, and Garamond dates from the 1500s).
Update: It didn’t last. First, the fine aspects of Victorian Modern Serif fonts just don’t seem to map well to screen pixels. Modern screens much more closely approximate the papers and inks of 200 or more years ago, which together had difficulty reproducing the fine details that were added in the Victorian era as a sign of modernity. Second, there’s the matter of the missing ligatures. Libre Baskerville, like its original namesake, was designed to cope with less-than-ideal resolution, and it comes with a full set of ligatures. So I think I’ll use that. It has at least some of the look I was aiming for, and it’s better to pull off some of a look and succeed than to attempt all of it and fail.
In the canyon. See link at end of post for more images.
Once in his life, a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it.
— N. Scott Momaday
There is a great good in returning to a landscape that has had extraordinary meaning in one’s life. It happens that we return to such places in our minds irresistibly. There are certain villages and towns, mountains and plains that, having seen them walked in them lived in them even for a day, we keep forever in the mind’s eye. They become indispensable to our well-being; they define us, and we say, I am who I am because I have been there, or there.
— Ibid.
One of my goals on my most recent trip to New Mexico to visit my parents had been to revisit White Rock Canyon, a landscape I bonded with in my youth. It was not even a half-mile from the house I lived in during my teens. Initially, like most, I concentrated my visits in the colder months, because the canyon becomes an inferno in the summer; its black basalt walls collect and concentrate the heat of the already intense Southwestern sun.
Then one June curiosity got the best of me: what would the canyon be like now? What would the hottest and driest spot in the county be like during the hottest and driest part of the year (as June is, in New Mexico)? There was only one way to find out, so one fine scorching afternoon I loaded a day pack with several canteens and descended into nature’s oven.
The cacti were in their typical June defiance. As the most drought-tolerant of plants, they could afford to bloom despite the conditions, and they did. As such, they were richly reaping the rewards of their monopoly on the supply of pollen and nectar; each cactus blossom was teeming with pollinators.
As expected, it was hot. Clouds of powdery, dessicated dust rose with every footfall. It was a challenge to exercise discipline and ration my water so I would still have some on the trip up. The further I descended, the hotter it got. The grasses and forbs were withered and brittle brown amongst the angular black boulders and parched soil. The branchlets of the junipers and even the blooming cacti looked wizened and water-deprived.
Then I turn a corner of the trail and see a view of vibrant, lush, defiant green appear. It seems like a hallucination, so out of place in this dry land in its driest season. It’s the sort of green one might see in Ohio or Louisiana or the Pacific Northwest, a green born of plant life exuberating in a water surplus.
I’ve been here before, so know it is no hallucination. The same descent that brought me into ever hotter conditions brought me ever closer to the water table. At the rim, it was nearly 1,000 feet below the surface. Here, near the bottom, the surface meets it. Multiple springs burst forth and merge into a clear stream.
I enter into the deep shade and rest by the first spring. It is mercifully cooler here among the verdure and abundant water. After a few minutes I glance upstream. Orchids!
Hundreds of orchids, in fact. In full bloom. More wild orchids than I have ever seen in one place. It turns out that these springs are one of the few places in New Mexico where the stream orchid grows, and they bloom in June. Because nobody I know enters the canyon in June, nobody I know knows about them.
That decided it; from then on I regularly visited the canyon, year-round, even though people thought I was nuts for going there in the summer when it was so hot. In August, the area around the springs was more magical yet. Cardinal flowers bloomed in a profusion as great as the orchids did earlier.
I had been wanting to see these rare flowers ever since hearing about them as a younger child in Illinois. I had given up hope of seeing them when we moved west, thinking they were a strictly Eastern/Midwestern plant. The tall spikes of scarlet humming with hummingbirds looked like a scene that belonged more in the jungles of Central America than the high deserts of New Mexico. Yet I could lift my eyes and see that beyond the narrow strip watered by the stream and springs, the austere landscape remained.
Some days I paused on the rim before I enter the canyon, surveying the landscape and choosing an off-trail destination that looks interesting from above. Other discoveries followed: a rock wall covered in dozens of petroglyphs, benches untouched by sheep and cattle where the grasses grew as tall and thick as they did everywhere centuries ago, ancient irrigation works, piles of giant boulders that left one feeling as if an ant amongst grains of coarse sand, unusual ferns (yes, desert ferns), and others I can’t recall at the moment.
Naturally, I had to go back someday, but my parents moved, first to Texas, then back to New Mexico but 100 miles from the canyon. It’s never been convenient to work in a side trip, but I kept saying to myself that someday I’d rent a car and make a day trip there.
Someday was Monday. It being in a town I had lived in for eight years, I drove directly to the trailhead with no missteps. There is now a fancy sign with an elevation profile and rules. I did not read the rules. Other than that, there were not any big changes. No new enlarged parking lot, no big crowds at the trailhead; it was basically the same as I had remembered. From the rim, the familiar landscape of river, semi-desert vegetation and Toreva blocks came into view.
It was winter, so no sightings of wildflowers this time (though the ferns are evergreen and were still there). There was still the unique fragrance of the canyon, a mix of sagebrush, basalt, and dust. It was still surprisingly free from human sights and sounds for a place right on the edge of a town: canyons lie below the surrounding land, frustrating the ability for sounds to enter them. It’s the converse of how you can see and hear signs of distant civilization from a otherwise remote mountaintop.
I found and climbed the boulder pile (easy to find, it’s close to the trail) and visited the petroglyph wall (less easy, it’s a detour off-trail of at least a half mile through terrain that is in places quite rugged). The latter spot was no longer completely my own, as others were obviously visiting and admiring the ancient artwork, as evidenced by the faint trail, marked by cairns, and trampled vegetation at the site itself.
Overall, however, the canyon has changed far less in the intervening 35-odd years since I last saw it than many attractions in that state have. Part of it is it’s not really a tourist attraction: it’s a county park, not a state or national one, and the county really doesn’t publicize it much (there’s no signs directing one to the canyon from the nearest major highway). Mostly, it’s a spot for the locals.
Halfway through my visit I realize how much that place is still part of me today, how its lessons in harsh beauty have influenced my own outlooks. I just can’t get on board with so much New Age stuff because it strikes me as all soft and mushy and friendly and cute; the world isn’t all soft and mushy and friendly and cute, sorry. Ditto for a good chunk of politically liberal beliefs that think all problems can simply be loved away; sometimes things must be fought for. I care even less for right-wingers and their cheering on of capitalism and its subjugation and domestication of the wild.
The natural world exists on its own terms, and it’s not simply good and bad according to our own metrics (nor should it be). The canyon can outright kill (and has killed) the unprepared, the foolish, and sometimes the simply unlucky. Hazards abound: extremes of temperature, a disorienting terrain, rattlesnakes, and sheer cliffs among them.
Would those orchids have been the experience they were if it was easy and pleasant to get to them, if I had expected them because I had heard of them from somebody else first and gone to see them, if there had been crowds and paved trails and a gift shop there? If there had been signs and rules and regulations and profit-making capitalists charging money everywhere, instead of the freedom to explore and wander that I had then? If the weather had been comfortable and temperate?
No, I don’t want a world engineered to be nice and safe, or a world engineered to be efficient and profitable. I want a wild world, a free world.
Circa 2011 I dumped Safari for Firefox. Safari had come out with what I term a “turkey upgrade” that made it painfully slow. Plus, Safari’s Javascript engine has always tended to suck. Add to that the recent slowness factor and it was worth putting up with how Firefox’s UI sometimes annoying departs from normal Macintosh standards.
Now Firefox has come out with a turkey upgrade of its own: Firefox Quantum. It’s almost hideously ugly and un-Mac-like. There’s so much clutter up top that the box that you enter the URL to browse to in can almost never display the whole URL at once any more.
Worse, the designers made the atrocious decision to devote the entire top part of the window to the browser tabs; there’s not much place to click on if you just want to move the browser window. You must fight your way to one of the far top corners in order to do that (and “fight” is the correct word, given that it makes it needlessly difficult to move the browser window).
What happens, of course, is that I’m used to Firefox acting how it used to (and, for that matter, how every other Mac program works), where the entire top most part of the window can be used to grab and move it. So I end up grabbing a tab and moving it. Which of course causes the tab to become a window of its own. This is something I almost never want to do. Congratulations, Firefox, you’ve made it easy for me to do something I almost never want and needlessly difficult to do something I often want.
As much as I disliked formalized higher education, my experiences would have probably been far more negative had I attended an elite private university like Harvard.
No “Liquid Fuel” Stove Works Like Your Kitchen Stove
You have to go through a process to light them, because they don’t actually run on liquid fuel: they boil their liquid fuel, then run on the resulting vapors. That’s because it’s difficult to directly burn a liquid fuel cleanly and efficiently.
But a cold, unlit stove can’t boil any gasoline, so it must be briefly operated directly (and inefficiently) on some sort of liquid fuel (typically its own gasoline) to heat it up to the point where it can boil its fuel and get running normally. The exact procedure varies a great deal from model to model and manufacturer to manufacturer.
That only takes about a minute, and Coleman actually came up with one of the best such procedures, but it does still take a minute. You don’t just turn on the gas valve of a cold “liquid fuel” stove and have an instant clean flame ready to go. Worse, it looks strange to the uninitiated, who often tend to worry that the stove is about to cause a conflagration of explosion when in fact it’s just acting normally for a cold start.
This was not a surprise to me, but I figured I’d mention it, just in case some random person unaware of it happens to read this post.
The 425E Is Even Less Like a Kitchen Stove Than a One-Burner White Gas Stove
Not only is there a lighting process to go through, but the burners don’t operate independently of each other. There’s a main burner (whose heat vaporizes the fuel) and an auxiliary one (that piggybacks off the vapor made by the generator and main burner). For flame control, there’s a valve that controls the fuel going to both burners, and one that controls the auxiliary burner only.
If you want only one burner on, that has to be the main burner. If you want one burner on high, and the other on low, it’s the main that must be the one on high. Upshot is you often end up swapping pots around instead of (or in addition to) just adjusting the burner flame level.
All of Coleman’s multi-burner gasoline stoves are like this, not just the 425E. None of the above is a surprise, because I remember how my parents used such a stove decades ago.
It Does Simmer, and It Is Stable
The tippiness and the limited simmering ability of my one-burner Coleman 440 were the main motives for wanting an alternate liquid fuel stove.
No More Annoying Wasteful Canisters
What are the annoyances of propane canisters? Let me count them:
There is no legal way to refill a canister. You throw the empties away.
Recyclers typically don’t take the empties. They go in the trash, not the metal recycling bin.
Don’t want to take a partly-full canister on a trip? Too bad; see point No. 1 above. Either suck it up and take it, or add it to your growing collection of partly-full canisters and take a new full one.
A canister is a declining source of power. The emptier it gets, the worse its performance gets. Below 1/4 full, performance is seriously impacted if the temperature is below 50°F/10°C. Which of course is precisely when you most want a nice, hot meal.
I’m Still Keeping the Propane Stove
Why? Revisit the first two sections. White gas stoves intimidate many people, particularly when first lit. That’s a minus on group camp-outs, where you want something simple that won’t surprise or startle novice users. The other 95% of the time, however, I’ll be using white gas from now on.
All in All, It Seems to Be a Good Deal
For one quarter the price of a new one-burner MSR Dragonfly, and one-half the price of a used one in unknown condition, I got a reconditioned, known-good, Coleman two-burner stove. The Coleman stove was also approximately one-quarter the price of the necessary hardware (tank, hose, adapter) to run my two-burner propane stove from a refillable tank instead of those annoying and poor-performing canisters.
The only real downside is the vastly greater weight and size of the Coleman stove compared to the Dragonfly. Since I only very seldom backpack, that’s a minor issue, and basically countered by having an extra burner to cook on. I already have two stoves suitable for backpack use, anyhow.
Last fall, I took my old single-burner Coleman stove camping. It was the first time in decades I had used it, but I knew how badly canister stoves acted when temperatures were in the forties, and this was a trip to Wyoming, where lows could be expected to be in the twenties each night.
The pump didn’t pump well when I tried it. After some research with a search engine, I fed it a couple drops of household lubricating oil and waited a few minutes. It pumped perfectly. I filled the tank and did a test firing. The stove operated just as I had remembered it from years back.
And it was very nice to have a stove the just belted out the heat, no matter how chilly it was. Gone forever was the “tank is only partially full, so performance sucks in cold or even cool weather” syndrome. But it was tippy, vulnerable to the wind, and difficult to make it simmer reliably.
I had been lusting after an MSR Dragonfly, but those are way too spendy to rationalize on my presently limited budget. So I’ve been keeping an eye on the local Craigslist instead. Most of the Dragonflies there were still $70 and up. Then I spied a Coleman two-burner car-camping stove on sale for $35, about $10 less than the norm for such things, in the “items available in nearby areas” section. Its picture showed it in very good condition, atop a stack of other such stoves, and the ad mentioned the seller being hard of hearing. Ah, thought I, a fully checked-out and restored stove from a retired tinkerer with a hobby business to pass the time. Probably every bit the deal it appears to be.
It’s not lightweight like the Dragonfly, but I seldom backpack anyhow. My Dad had (still has) one and used it for years on camping trips and (when burn bans were in place) picnics. It never let him down. It was not tippy. It simmered easily. It performed acceptably in the wind.
But it was for sale in Mount Vernon. Add the ferry tolls and gas and it’s totally not a justifiable expense. Except that I was going to Lopez Island this weekend, and Mount Vernon is essentially on the way there. So I contacted the seller and said that if it was still available Sunday (today), I was interested in buying it. It was, and the seller was basically as I had sussed him out. He demonstrated the stove worked, we chatted a bit, and I left with it. It set me back 1/4 the price of a new Dragonfly.
My ride partner had asked to be dropped off downtown, so he could visit a used book store he liked. While the proprietor was ringing up my friend’s purchases, I remembered a highly-regarded (and out of print) book on mosses I had been wanting for some time. I asked where the botany section was and darted off. And there it was, priced at $9.95. It sells for $40 and up on Amazon. It followed me home, too.
A few months ago I had the opportunity to use an iPhone. Unbelievably, the thing took eight keystrokes to simply hang up an in-progress call. Eight! I am not making this up:
After 30 seconds or so of idleness, the phone locks itself due to security measures. (The phone for some reason considers itself to be “idle” even though it is actively in use for a call at the time.)
Given virtually all calls last longer than 30 seconds, that means you must first get the attention of the now-locked iPhone. Press the one and only actual mechanical button offering tactile feedback the device has (1 keystroke, 1 in total).
It is now time to enter the unlock code for the phone (4 additional keystrokes, 5 in total, and counting).
Despite the device being a phone, and a phone call being actively in place, for some reason you are now in the phone’s default mode, which has nothing to do with making or managing telephone calls. Tap the icon that puts the phone in phone mode (1 additional keystroke, 6 in total, and counting).
Despite there being a phone call actively in place, when you enter phone mode you are placed in the mode where you can make an additional call, not for managing the existing in-progress call. You must manually select the current call (1 additional keystroke, 7 in total, and counting).
You are finally now presented with the desired icon to click on that will end the call. Click on it (1 final keystroke, grand total of 8).
Congratulations! You have at long last managed to hang up.
By the time that’s all done, odds are at least 50-50 the other party has long since hung up already and the call has timed out before you could hang it up.
Why would I want to have a device that packs so many non-phone duties into itself, and implements its total set of duties so poorly, that using it for its primary intended purpose is then severely compromised? The nearly 40-year-old 2500DM set on my desk never has firmware to update, will never radically and unexpectedly change its user interface, and has a set of hook switch buttons that are always there waiting for me to use them on a moment’s notice whenever I want to hang up on a call. Even the cheapest flip phone has an END button that’s always there waiting for me to use it. Neither phone decides in the midst of an in-progress call of all things that it’s “idle” and now needs a password to be unlocked.
The killer came when I realized that this is an iPhone, and Apple has a well-deserved reputation for the best-designed system software. That is how the best smartphone on the market implements its user interface. The other smartphones are almost certainly worse.
So, I’m in this basement where a washing machine has just been installed. Two plumbers are there, having just added the supply and drain lines for the machine. There is also a washtub sink in the basement.
The basement lies below the level of the sewers, so both washtub and washing machine drain to a small tank which has a lift pump in it. Note I said small: the tank was intended to serve the washtub sink only and has not been upgraded to reflect the new washing machine. I point out to the plumbers that it’s almost certain to overflow and flood, and they both dismiss my claim, pointing out my lack of professional experience as a plumber.
The first load of clothes is loaded and the machine started. When it reaches the end of the wash cycle and drains, sure enough, the tank overflows. The plumbers express surprise about this mystifying and unexpected (to them) outcome, and propose solutions that fall short of expanding either the tank and or pump capacity sufficient to prevent further such incidents.
I point out that at minimum, the tank needs to be able to accommodate the maximum volume expected to be drained from the sink at any one time plus the volume of water from the machine, or the pump must be able to accompany the sum of the two corresponding flow rates. My objections are dismissed; there is insufficient space for a large tank and it is considered too costly to replace the line from the pump with a larger one.
